“Painting Exhibition at a Construction Site” is a presentation of 25 original paintings alongside documentation of “Painting Exhibition” — a long-term urban art project developed since mid-2011.
The exhibition took place on the second floor of the Cosmopolitan high-rise in Warsaw, at the time still under construction. To ensure safe access to the exhibition, a spatial corridor was built, separating the second floor from the rest of the construction site.
“(…) This is an exhibition that confronts traditionally understood academic easel painting with spontaneous, non-systemic, anarchic, and uncontrollable artistic actions rooted in the world of street art (…)” — excerpt from a text by Marcin Rutkiewicz / External Art Foundation.
“Painting Exhibition” is a spatially, temporally, and formally unrestricted intervention into urban space. Here, the artist simultaneously assumes the roles of painter, curator, and gallerist, operating with unlimited exhibition possibilities.
“Escaping the sterile and closed structure of art institutions, seeking my own space for dialogue, I subject the painting to the test of place and time. In an era of an ever-accelerating and increasingly saturated urban iconosphere, I enter it, find a fragment of still unoccupied space, and place a painting there. The scale of the intervention depends on the specific site. The choice of location comes from an impulse — the desire to inscribe a particular painting into a particular space. How long a given display lasts depends solely on when it is absorbed by the city.”
